I like to have matching monitors to go along with my vintage PCs: a Tandy monitor
for a Tandy computer an IBM monitor for an IBM computer and so forth and ever since
I restored a Zenith Z148 PC about a year ago I've been looking for a Zenith monitor
to go along with it and recently I found one on eBay and the seller had best offer
enabled on the listing so we negotiated a reasonable price and I bought the monitor
that matching Zenith monitor is only a 12-inch monochrome composite monitor
so it's not that big but still I was expecting something like this medium
Home Depot box to show up and to my surprise this is what showed up instead
something a lot smaller and bulgier than I expected that's something you
definitely don't want to see when you're having a CRT monitor delivered to you:
a box that's barely any bigger than the monitor itself and one which is bulging at
the sides and at the top it's a little bit longer that way but I would expect the CRT
to be more squarish than that it doesn't have a particularly long neck to it the
one good thing is that there are no loose shards of broken glass inside so at least
the CRT didn't get smashed but that does not necessarily mean it escaped without any damage
so let's open it up and see if it survived without any great damage
luckily this was only being shipped to me from New York State and I'm in New Jersey so it's a
neighboring state so it didn't have to travel a very long distance to get here so that could
help prevent damage now they did use bubble wrap but I doubt that's enough to really protect it
because CRT monitors really should be double boxed even if you do use bubble wrap
so we'll see what we get
there's a number of layers here so it's... I don't know maybe this
really is an unusually small monitor for its screen size
I thought I heard some plastic cracking hopefully that is not the case
ooh I do hear loose pieces inside
yeah that's not good see even all these layers of bubble wrap and it still can get damaged
yeah I don't like the sound of that
oh yeah the bezel got cracked hopefully the screen itself survived yeah that's not good
now I don't see a dark spot in the middle
so it's hopefully the case that this CRT is still holding a vacuum
and you may think bubble wrap is good for protection because it's easy to pop the
bubbles but when you build up multiple layers of it, it gets harder and harder and it actually
doesn't have a lot of give to it so any hard shock to the package is just going to get
transferred directly to the monitor or whatever else you have inside the box whereas if you have
something like soft foam you can see how much more flexible that is and it's going to do
much better job of absorbing impacts rather than transmitting it to the contents inside the box
I took some photos of the damage and submitted a return request on eBay and
I immediately got a full refund without needing to return it so at least that's good but it's
still a shame to see a monitor like this get destroyed even if it's really nothing
special I mean it's just a standard 12-inch monochrome composite monitor so it's not
like some monitors that use a proprietary interface and are very difficult to find
I got scared when I looked closer and saw these dark splotches on the face
of the CRT but that's actually just dirt that can be cleaned off so there is still
a possibility that this picture tube did not get broken and at least that part of
it might be salvageable in case I find a monitor that is physically good but has a
weak CRT I could transplant this one into it to make another monitor work properly again
I turned on the power switch on the back of the monitor set the
brightness and contrast controls to about halfway I have it plugged into this power
strip and I'm going to turn it on and see if I get any signs of life out of it and
if something starts going horribly wrong I can immediately turn it off so here we go
now we may or may not get a raster on this with no video signal going into
it but let me try adjusting the controls ah we do get a raster
it doesn't really look correct but at least it's some sign of life
now I connected it to the output of a Handycam displaying color bars so
I'll see if that shows up on the screen of course it will not be in color because this
is a monochrome screen and hey look at that that's actually not too bad
and the bandwidth is wide enough I'm actually seeing the dot crawl of the
color coding because it's not filtering that out
so that's actually pretty good
not bad for a free broken monitor
there are some adjustments on the back let me see if those work OK
that's vertical size these lines here look like they may be part
of the vertical blanking interval so I'll adjust that until they go off the screen
and this one is horizontal positioning it looked pretty well centered already then finally this one
I'm not sure what that one does or if it's even working
horizontal width
yeah I think this one might be broken so I'm turning it and nothing's happening
I removed all the screws now I'm going to take
off the cover and see exactly what kind of damage is inside
it really is a miracle that the CRT didn't get smashed because these two mounts for it
are completely broken off while the two on this side are still intact and wedged
between the picture tube and the circuit board are a whole bunch of shards of broken plastic
the picture tube doesn't say who made it but it lists an EIA code of 462 I looked that up and it
was made by Philips but on the yoke of the CRT it says ZRC which stands for Zenith Radio Corporation
the electrolytic capacitors on the main circuit board were made by Nichicon and
there are no Rifa capacitors on this circuit board so it's not going to go
up in smoke like the power supply of the matching Zenith computer did
and I don't think that horizontal width control is actually broken it's just stiffer turning
than the other two controls because instead of a potentiometer it's actually a slug in
a coil that you're turning when you adjust it so it takes a little bit more effort to adjust
here are all the broken shards of plastic I've collected so far but
amazingly the entire rear frame of the monitor survived with no damage
so this is entirely intact and down in there it actually says Borg Warner and
Dow so maybe they had something to do with manufacturing this monitor
there's a better look at those controls on the back and the information sticker
it's Zenith model ZVM 1220 they also had the ZVM 1230 which was the same thing with
a green phosphor and the ZVM 1240 which used the MDA interface to connect it to
the computer instead of composite and it's a little hard to read the stamping but this
one was made in March 1987 and I noticed in the brochure for it the color of the
cabinet is listed as office tan so according to Zenith old computers aren't beige they're tan
I carefully removed the picture tube and electronics to see if there might be any hope
of putting Humpty Dumpty back together again this corner looks like it may be repairable
because there's just a few large chunks of plastic which I'm reasonably confident I would
be able to glue back together but this corner in the front here there's this one big chunk
here but then it pretty much disintegrated into little shards of plastic and even the mounting
posts for the CRT I doubt I would be able to gain any structural rigidity to them even if
I was able to piece it back together but at least if I can get three mounting posts for
the CRT out of the original four I would call that good enough to put it back together
so here's the progress so far it doesn't look pretty but at least the frame is
back into one piece more or less and I do have an idea of how I can try to fill that
in because those parts of the plastic there were just too pulverized to try
to piece it back together but at least cosmetically it's mostly back together
I just used standard superglue for this because this corner is no longer going to be structural
the parts were just too far gone to try to rebuild that mounting post for the CRT next
I'm going to work on this corner actually I was able to find another piece of the puzzle so that
makes an even smaller hole I need to fill to put back together the broken pieces of this corner
I'm going to use the Loctite plastics bonding system for hard-to-bond plastics because I
had good look in the past using this to repair the plastic carrier for the head of an 8-track player
where regular superglue just cracked apart as soon as I tightened down the screw while
this is still holding fine after several years so hopefully it'll work fine for this monitor as well
well everything fit together perfectly when it was dry but when it came time to glue it
together this last piece here as you can see didn't quite fit right I think what happened
is that this bonding activator partially melts the plastic and what didn't help is
that I forgot to apply it to both parts so there was about a 30-second delay between applying it
to one half of the broken piece and applying it to the other half and the melting action
of that bonding activator must have distorted the shape of the plastic so by the time I put
this piece in it didn't quite fit right but I tried to reinforce it with some more glue and
besides I don't think the CRT actually contacts this piece up here that's just structural the
piece that the CRT actually fits against is down here which did not get broken so hopefully these
two posts will hold and be in their correct position when it comes time to reassemble this
now I'm going to fill in this chasm with JB Weld just to try to reinforce it as much as possible
major progress on repairing the Zenith monitor I got the CRT and circuit board reinstalled on
the corner where I glued the broken pieces back together I filled in that void with two entire
tubes of JB Weld just to provide more support for those pieces because I didn't want to just
rely on the superglue so that's all back together and so far it's holding the CRT
and on this corner which took the brunt of the impact where the screw hole that
was supposed to hold the CRT was too far gone to piece back together I decided to repurpose
the screw hole for putting on the cover for supporting the CRT because obviously it's more
important to support the CRT than the cover which is just a decorative piece of plastic
so that's what I did there and I Dremeled out the cover to give room for that screw
don't laugh but I ended up using Plastic Wood to fill up the hole in the case and to patch up
this chunk that was missing it doesn't look pretty because I still need to sand it down but I really
just wanted to see how well this would stick to the plastic and how well is going to hold up
"are you ready people? let's see how this works oh my God I think it might
work is the water going to boil?" "give it about 10 seconds to see if it heats
up" "this is fun I fixed it I just fixed a microwave for $15 bitch all by myself"
the monitor is all back to together and looking pretty darn good especially
considering it was on the brink of destruction I currently have
it connected to my Tandy 1000 just to have some test patterns to display on it it has
a really nice amber phosphor display which this camcorder is not doing justice to
it looks more yellow on video while in real life it's a bit more of an orange color
"so it's 3:30 a.m. 3:30 a.m I mean who on Earth wants to get up at that hour?"
and there is the final result the Zenith Z148 PC set up with its matching ZVM 1220
monochrome monitor at this angle and distance you can hardly even tell that
it was smashed into pieces during shipping and glued back together
I added my little Epson dot matrix receipt printer as the perfect finishing touch